Conditioning on Dialog Acts improves Empathy Style Transfer
Renyi Qu, Lyle Ungar, João Sedoc · 2023
We explore the role of dialog acts in style transfer, specifically empathy style transfer -rewriting a sentence to make it more empathetic without changing its meaning.Specifically, we use two novel few-shot prompting strategies: target prompting, which only uses examples of the target style (unlike traditional prompting with source/target pairs); and dialog-actconditioned prompting, which first estimates the dialog act of the source sentence and then makes it more empathetic using few-shot examples of the same dialog act.Our study yields two key findings: (1) Target prompting typically improves empathy more effectively than pairwise prompting, while maintaining the same level of semantic similarity; (2) Dialog acts matter.Dialog-act-conditioned prompting enhances empathy while preserving both semantics and the dialog-act type.Different dialog acts benefit differently from different prompting methods, highlighting the need for further investigation of the role of dialog acts in style transfer.